Chris Hadfield reveals space’s surreal beauty, like the Aurora Australis’ hidden reds and oranges during his 166-day ISS mission, while detailing weightlessness’ toll—8% hip bone loss, year-long recovery, and daily two-hour exercise. He contrasts NASA’s Space Shuttle (3g launches) with Soyuz’s lifeboat simplicity (4–4.5g), and warns Mars missions face radiation, micrometeoroids, and psychological strain before feasible. Rogan praises Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, calling him a "bad motherfucker" for his insights, before shifting to sponsor codes. The episode underscores space’s fragility and humanity’s urgent need for sustainable energy solutions like fusion. [Automatically generated summary]
Your body doesn't have to lift the blood up to your head when you're weightless, right?
So your whole cardiovascular system changes.
All the nice little mechanisms that squeeze the balloon that is your body to get the blood up to your head, they stop working.
Your heart gets smaller.
You start losing your skeleton.
Your balance system completely shuts down.
I mean, it has no stimulus from gravity anymore, so you become totally visually based.
So when you come home, it's brutal building all those things back up again.
And most of them, you feel...
I mean, you lose the calluses on the bottom of your feet.
It's kind of disgusting because your feet are like a snake up there, but the bottom of your feet are shedding because you never use the bottom of your feet.
And you build up calluses on the top because you're always tucking your feet underneath things.
So when you come back, you even have to grow the calluses back at the bottom of your feet.
And the thing that takes the longest is your skeleton body.
I lost about 8% of the bone across my hips, but it's grown back.
And within about a year of landing, I'll hopefully be back to normal.
We do one hour of cardiovascular and one hour of resistive every single day, seven days a week for the whole half a year that you're up there.
And we've determined that's the best trade-off between getting useful work done, you know, because it's a big multinational laboratory, and keeping your body healthy.
The Russians even tried a suit they call a penguin suit.
Which is like a set of coveralls, tight-fitting coveralls that's full of elastics, so that every time you bend your elbow or twist your body or something, you're fighting the resistance of the suit, because they thought then you could sort of get it for free.
But you need to demand it.
You need to actually heavily force your body to exercise.
And if you do that, then you can stay in shape.
But we started out with a resistive exercise device, and then it was the improved iRED.
And now we're on ARED, which is the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, as we've learned, you know, how to make it better so that we can return to Earth healthy.
Or, you know, when we go to the Moon, more importantly, when we go to Mars, because it takes about half a year to get there.
Well, this is one of the problems we need to solve.
It's been up there 13 years now with people on board.
But it's like...
Sailing up and down the coast with insight of land.
You know, we haven't headed across the body of water, even to go to the moon, as far as habitation goes.
So, right now we're just sailing up and down the coast of the world, figuring out how to beat osteoporosis, how did the radiation, the psychology of it, what to make the hull out of, how do you make a toilet that works, a closed environmental system.
Got to invent all those things.
Then, I think, we'll go to the moon, because it's the next, it's only three days away.
And then we can do How to use resources that are there.
How do you generate power?
How do you navigate?
How do you do all that?
And then once we get that sorted out, then I think we'll go further, but it's still a lot of years away.
A really interesting discovery about three weeks ago, Curiosity, that big rover that, That is driving around on Mars right now has some pretty good equipment on it and it discovered just in the last few weeks that in every cubic foot of dirt on Mars there's a quart of water.
So there's oceans of water.
I mean the topsoil is full of water on Mars.
So that's really promising for when we get there because water is hydrogen and oxygen.
Oxygen to breathe, hydrogen and oxygen makes fuel, hydrogen and oxygen makes water.
That's a huge resource.
The moon, there's water there, but it's really rare.
So that's a big discovery for us eventually being able to go there.
But, you know, we need a power source.
The sun's a long ways away and it's dusty on Mars.
You can't just, you can't have a solar-powered bulldozer.
You know, you need a power source.
And we need, how do you navigate?
And there's just a, how do you build a perfect closed-loop environmental system so that you don't We have constant losses.
Because the space station, we only, I think it's about 92% of our water we reclaim, but we constantly need that little trickle from Earth of new water because it's not perfect.
There's a lot of stuff we don't even know what we don't know yet.
And that's, I think, why we'll sort a lot of that out on the Moon before we launch to Mars.
To me, watching the footage of the rover and the images that it sent back was almost surreal.
It didn't seem real.
It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they sent a robot to another planet, and it's roaming around taking pictures and sending them back, and we're looking at them.
And just one of those, in my opinion, one of those paradigm-shifting moments where when, you know, we're back here on Earth and we're watching those images, you're like, wow, they can do this now.
Especially in weird shadowy images like those images were.
I mean, they were some really unique things.
There's a rock near my house that's a square rock.
And when I have a friend who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories and he believes in the face on Mars and a lot of different stuff, and I said, I'm going to show you something, man.
Come over here.
I go, look at that rock.
Do you think anybody made that rock?
I go, that rock is just made.
That's just a rock amongst a pile of rocks.
It's big and it's kind of square.
Not perfectly square, but if you looked at a blurry picture of it that was taken from space, you would swear, this is the building block for a pyramid.
When you sit in that space station and you're floating above Earth, much as you were saying that your colleagues started referring to Earth as a separate individual entity and you guys were separate from Earth, did you look out when you're looking at the vastness of Everything.
I mean, it's just everything.
And did it feel like Earth was in a neighborhood more?
You know what I mean?
That we weren't isolated.
It's so silly.
The thing is so big.
Did you feel more connected to the rest of the universe in any sort of a way?
Joe, when you're in the side of the spaceship, And you look at the world.
You're looking at it through the windows.
And I came back.
It was so funny.
I came back from my first space flight.
I was sitting in the living room with my wife, Helena.
And we were watching Star Trek.
And they show that scene with Sulu and whoever up front.
And they were in the standard orbit, Mr. Sulu.
And there's the curve of the Earth underneath.
And I remember going, that's it.
That's exactly what it looks like.
They got that right.
They guessed right in 1968 or whatever it was.
Because when you're inside the spaceship, it looks like that.
The difference is when you go outside.
And then it's like the difference between sitting in your living room looking outside and hanging on a cliff or hanging on a half-dome or somewhere where it's an entirely different perspective, even though it may look at the same thing.
Being outside is so immersive.
The world is no longer nicely underneath you like Sulu, but it is this huge hanging, spinning mass next to you, and the universe is what's around you, and you are You are part of it.
You're suspended in it.
We aren't used to having the universe under our feet or all around us and feeling that you're in it, not just sort of below it, looking up at it.
And that is really different.
And that's when you really see that the world is just in the neighborhood and that it is a ball with the moon being a ball and the sun's over there.
And if we go out there, that's Mars.
You really get that feeling when you're out on a spacewalk.
I've heard several astronauts talk about that feeling and that moment when they are outside of a spacecraft looking at the universe itself and saying that it changed them forever.
I've often thought that questions, pondering questions like the randomness of the universe or just the reality that we know about subatomic particles and the idea of the universe being this fractal thing and impossible and never-ending, I think it's almost like walking up to a mountain and going, yeah, I could see how that could be picked up.
But you can't really pick it up yourself, so you're just like, man, I guess it could be random.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't understand.
I don't even know what the fuck random means.
The idea of random seems...
The universe itself seems to be this incredibly complex thing that has...
Not just laws, but very clear directions that things move into.
It constantly is complexifying from the Big Bang till now and the idea of black holes eating matter and creating a singularity and that.
Possibly these new astrophysicists and string theorists guys are saying that they think that inside every black hole may in fact be a completely different universe.
You know, on the top of the space station, we have an experiment put there by a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Sam Ting.
And it's from CERN, from the big particle accelerator that's under Switzerland and France.
It's their baby.
And it's up there.
It's a huge magnet.
And what it's doing is collecting subatomic particles of the universe.
And it's got layer after layer of detector, so it can try and figure out what they all are as they come ripping through.
And it's collected trillions and trillions of them.
It's been up there for the last couple of years.
And the reason is, we don't know what the universe is made of.
We can only account for 5% of the universe with the known particles that we have.
We don't know what 95% of the universe is even made of.
And so we call it dark energy and dark matter.
And we're trying to indirectly prove that those exist based on the proportions of the subatomic particles we're collecting up at the top of the space station.
And it's a decadal-long project.
And they released the first layer of the results back in the spring.
And it's starting to look like maybe some of the theories are correct.
But we talk as if we're conclusively brilliant and we understand everything.
I mean, we're still calling things dark matter and dark energy.
We have no idea, and we're just trying to figure it out.
As far as humans that have ever lived, we're the most informed, the most technologically capable.
But much like when we look back at the Renaissance era, or look back at Galileo being imprisoned because he dared question the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, We're going to make fun of us.
Someday, they're going to make fun of us like these dummies.
They didn't know what Clark Gluon Plasma was.
They had to use a particle accelerator to prove that the Higgs boson existed.
It is the most capable flying machine humans have ever built.
Unbelievable.
And three-quarters of everybody who's ever flown in space flew on the shuttle.
It was the first great lifter.
Its purpose was to take a huge spy satellite up.
This was the conception in the 60s and early 70s.
Take the best technology 60s spy satellite, launch out of Vandenberg, go straight north, go halfway around the world, take pictures of the hotspots of the world, come back again, and then use the wings to be able to go sort of sideways and sideslip because the world's turned underneath you and come back and land again after one orbit.
That's why we had wings on the shuttle, was so that we could carry this huge telescope.
And they weren't automated back then, so we needed a crew to be able to operate the telescope.
That's why the payload bay was the size that it was, and why the shuttle could lift the amount that it could lift.
It was to meet all those requirements.
That all immediately stopped being the reason for the space shuttle to exist, but the design was already set.
What that gave us, though, was a vehicle that could carry, gosh, 40,000 or 50,000 pounds up in a payload bay that's the size of a city bus and then bring it back and land it gently on a runway and carry a crew up to seven.
So it's like a space station all on its own.
An amazingly capable vehicle.
Amazingly complex, too.
And when things are amazingly complex, they're really expensive and hard to operate safely.
And we lost two crews, you know, as a result of the complexity of it.
The Soyuz is designed to take three people and a tiny bit of gear up to the space station, dock, stay there for half a year or longer as their lifeboat, and then at the end of time get back in and come back home again.
That's the Soyuz's purpose.
And it does that really well.
But it's tiny and very purpose-built.
The two of them are magnificent vehicles, but built for way different purposes, and both very carefully evolved to do what they do exquisitely well.
If you want to stay in orbit, you've got to go five miles a second.
If you're going a little slower, it's sort of like throwing something sideways.
Gravity pulls it down.
But if you can throw it sideways at five miles a second, then gravity will still pull it down.
But the Earth curves away underneath it if it's going fast enough.
You know, it like goes over the horizon before it falls.
So that's how we stay in orbit, is we go five miles a second.
But you can't go five miles a second in the air.
The friction's just too high.
So the rocket ships take you straight up to get you above the air.
And that takes about two minutes going straight up.
And in 45 seconds, you're through the speed of sound, straight up and accelerating.
And in 70 seconds, you're through the altitude and speed of the Concorde, accelerating straight up.
And after two minutes, you're about 160,000 feet and six times the speed of sound, but you're above almost all the air.
And then your first stage falls off.
So inside, it's this incredibly powerful push in your back, like a dragster, but like one that's gone off the road.
The vibration of pushing through the air.
It's like a tuning fork kind of vibration.
This enormous, powerful, jaws-of-a-dog kind of ride, straight up.
But then, after two minutes, the stage that got you above the air is all out of fuel.
Explodes off because you don't want to carry all that dead weight with you anymore and then you use the remaining engines for the next six minutes or six and a half to accelerate out horizontal basically to five miles a second and and so for the last six minutes it's like a long liquid drive heavy steady pushing like someone with their fist in your back pushing you faster and faster and faster a smoother ride because you're above the air and after just under nine minutes like 8.45 or so You're
exactly the right place, the right direction, and the right speed.
The engines shut off, and you're in space, and you're weightless.
The shuttle's about 3g, and in fact, when you hit 3g, the throttle start coming back because it was only built for about 3.5g, so three times your normal weight.
So if you weigh 200 pounds, you weigh 600 pounds in there.
The Soyuz is about 4 or 4.5g.
So if you're a 200-pounder, you're up around 800-900 pounds.
If you take an F-A-18 and you grab the stick and you snap it into your lap, You aren't actually connected to anything except a computer.
It's little sensors.
It's fly-by-wire.
So it says, wow, he wants to turn right now.
And so then it moves all the control surfaces of the airplane, but it doesn't want to break the wings off.
So it will limit you.
The airplane limits the amount of G that it can pull.
And it'll give you about 8G. About 8G. That's all it'll give you.
Because otherwise you could structurally damage the airplane.
So there was a paddle you could actually, if you were going to hit the ground...
You could hit this paddle that would override the G-control system and snap it into your lap and just give you whatever the aerodynamics would give you.
And we've had people pull 12G. But the Soyuz, if you come into the atmosphere the wrong way, can pull 20 or 22G on the way home, which is just wicked.
When you're in an F-18, like when you flew with the Blue Angels, you're sitting upright.
So when you pull back, It pushes the blood down to your feet.
So the real limitation is how much of that can you stand before you can't stay awake, before you black out.
In a Soyuz, we're actually laying on our back.
So the blood doesn't drain out of your head.
It just gets kind of pushed to the back of your body.
So therefore you can survive it.
It won't black you out.
It doesn't damage you.
It's sort of like a prolonged car crash.
You know, people pull 20G in a car crash, but it's instantaneous.
If you fall into the atmosphere the wrong way in a Soyuz, then as you hit the thick atmosphere, it's almost like crashing into something super high G-peak for maybe 30 seconds, and then you come through that G-peak and slow down.
And it's survivable, but I wouldn't want to ride it.
And one of the mantras of astronauts is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.
So we think about that all the time.
And so we really are careful on the way up.
And so a big part of you is involved with that.
But another part of you is just It's just loving the ride so much.
And I found after a while that my cheeks were hurting.
And I was like, why is my face hurt?
And I realized because this smile, this big stupid smile was on my face so much that my cheeks were cramping up because it was so much of a thrill to go.
Well, if everything works perfectly, we're just watching.
And same in the shuttle.
We have very...
You know, hopefully, don't have to do anything.
But sometimes things don't go right.
And then you've got a bunch of things you can do, you know, various shutdowns and aborts.
And people probably don't know, but the shuttle, as it launched up the east coast of the U.S., we kept abort landing runways all the way up the coast.
You could land at Cherry Point, or you could land in New York, or you could land in Newfoundland, or all those places.
And so as you're ticking up the coast, you're constantly going, okay, if we have a failure now, we're going to abort this way, we're going to turn around, we're going to land in Bermuda, we're going to land here, we're going to land in...
And, you know, practice those like crazy.
And then you get to a certain point, and then you would land in North Africa or South France or in Spain.
And all those windows, all those tick points, all those thresholds you have to get through, that's what we're hyper-aware of.
We'd like it to be as automated as possible because that means things are predictable and things didn't break.
And for the vast majority of shuttle flights and Soyuz flights, it's automated.
But sometimes it's not on the way uphill.
And we've had engines fail or engines start to fail.
Had to shut engines down and go to backup or at least a reserve configuration of the engines.
Mid-launch?
Yeah.
During launch that happened on Apollo as well.
On the way back to Earth, We've had serious problems with the Soyuz where you have to take over and try and fly manually or come in ballistically which means it loses its ability to steer on the way home and you just start spinning the vehicle and then it just comes in like a pure meteorite.
You pull about 8 or 9 G on a ballistic entry and that's pretty tough after six months of weightlessness to suddenly if you're a 200 pounder now you weigh 1600 or 1700 pounds and that's pretty hard on the body.
And the reason is, of course, your vision is telling you one thing.
Telling you where the horizon is, where up is.
But your inner ear, which normally, when your eyes are closed, keeps you from falling over.
You know, you can close your eyes and not fall over.
That has forgotten completely what to do with gravity because you've been weightless for, whatever, five or six months.
So now you have this sudden great violent disagreement between what your eyes are saying and what your inner ear is saying.
It's like if you spin 50 times and then stop spinning and you stagger around.
So your body says, whoa, there is something seriously wrong.
Why is his vision so wildly different than his inner ear?
And for the last million years, one of the probable causes was you ate something poisonous.
You ate some sort of neurotoxin or something that is messing up your internal systems.
And it might kill you.
So the first thing your body makes you want to do is throw up.
Because it's trying to get rid of whatever it was you just ate.
And then the next thing your body makes you want to do is go lay down and go to sleep.
So you stop metabolizing it, right?
It's trying to keep you alive.
So when you first get back from space, your body's just screaming at you.
To throw up and go lie down.
But, you know, you got all this stuff to do and people are there to meet you and you're trying to just ignore those symptoms and pay attention to what, you know, what's going on.
And if the flight went well, and we work hard enough that they almost always do, there's a great sense of satisfaction because it's like the final step in an extremely complicated process where you have done everything right or enough things right that you can have that for the rest of your life.
So there's a tremendous feeling of joy and pride and accomplishment when you get back to Earth.
But what drives me nuts is how little we actually get to see of the stars because of light pollution.
I was at the Big Island, and I went to the Keck Observatory, and there's a station where the telescope is, and then below that, at like 9,000 feet, there's this visitor station.
When we were driving up there, I was worried that it was too cloudy.
I was like, oh, this is going to be terrible.
We wanted to go and see the stars, and we picked a cloudy night, but we drove through the clouds.
And then when you get above there and you realize that the entire Big Island, they have special diffused lighting to make sure that they don't emit light pollution, the view is life-changing.
Must be like one one millionth of what you experience on the space station.
But for me, it was a real life-changing moment.
I'll never forget it.
And I think about it all the time.
Whenever I look at the stars, I always think about that night in Hawaii.
That's what it looks like.
But even crazier, there's an image of it up there.
People, you know, of course the vast majority of people live in cities and the places that have the worst light pollution of the cities.
I had a similar experience to yours when I was an F-18 pilot.
I would get it up to High altitude, you know, going on across country, especially in the north, put on the autopilot and shut off every light in the cockpit and let my eyes adjust.
And you're already up at 40,000, 45,000 feet.
And so there's almost no atmosphere above you.
And you can see the texture of space.
You can see the, I mean, the Milky Way.
You can see why it's called the Milky Way.
I mean, it's a white, a gray-white part of the sky, you know.
And you don't need a telescope to see it.
You can see it with your eyes.
You don't need some special time-lapse photography.
So it's both humbling and really inspiring, I think, to see.
It puts everything into perspective.
But, I don't know, even if you try and work on light pollution, people are indoor creatures in cities and they have street lights and they drive around in cars.
I don't know how you get people to notice the universe around them.
And my son, who ran the social media for the flight to a large degree, sent me a note saying, hey dad, Mount Etna is erupting, you know, in southern Italy.
Have a look at Mount Etna.
So I'm a good dad, took a picture of Mount Etna.
But seeing the superheated lava and the smoke and the steam coming out of the earth was a really, especially when you're looking at the world as a ball, It was a really clear reminder of the fact that most of the planet is superheated lava and magma and where it's so hot that the rock is liquid and plastic, right?
And we just live on this little chilled crust, like the top of a porridge pot, you know?
And we just live on this little thin bit at the top that is crust.
And when you tip it the other way around and look up, half of the atmosphere is in the first three miles.
Three miles.
You know, think about it.
People go for a three-mile run, you know, and really the whole habitable atmosphere is three miles, above 15,000 feet.
It's hard to even live.
And yet we live on this little bit of cooled crust and this little sliver of air, and we think it's guaranteed.
We think we're invincible, right?
And we think the whole universe is here to serve us.
And we're like...
We're like bacteria in a corner.
Just found a little niche that will support our life.
Well, you can't Yeah, once you built the structure, it's real hard to change, of course.
And you can't just suddenly starve millions of people or kill millions of people just because you decide to change energy sources.
It has to be gradual, and we will be weaned off fossil fuels, but they've got to get a lot more scarce before we're going to bother, just because of its human nature.
Now, when you think about what's possible for the future, when they start talking about all these different propulsion methods that will someday be available, what if any of them appear viable?
Yeah, you're asking me to predict physics inventions of the future, which, gosh, I wish I could do that.
I'd do it tomorrow.
I don't know.
To me, the obvious answer is every single molecule that exists, every complex molecule and atom was put together in a blast furnace of a place with almost unlimited heat and pressure, which is the center of a sun.
And it stored that energy in every single atom and molecule that exists.
And we have yet to find a good way to get that energy back out.
But there is more energy in a pencil.
You know, if you could truly get the energy that's inside all of the molecules that are in there, there's so much energy stored there.
You know, we have like wood that's stored sunlight, right?
And by burning it, we can release that stored solar power.
Even nuclear.
But we haven't found a clean way to release the energy that gives us nuclear power.
We can do it, but we're still, you know, we're kind of cavemen about it, and we haven't got a clean way.
So I'm certain that at some point we will figure out how to, whether it'll be cold fusion or just fusion itself.
But if you read what they're doing in the various laboratories around the world, Even the experts think, well, we're probably 50 years away from being able to contain fusion so that it becomes a net positive power source.
But when the experts are saying it's 50 years until we can do it, who knows?
There was a recent article in one of the science magazines that the volume of nuclear waste could be reduced by 90%.
They've shown that they can mix plutonium-contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turn it into glass.
And it reduces its volume by 85% to 95% and effectively locks in the radioactive plutonium, creating a stable end product.
I've always felt like...
I mean, the nuclear waste thing is a huge issue, obviously.
I mean, they've done a lot of weird things like dig holes in the ground and buried in there in Nevada and, you know, and what's going on now in Fukushima is very disturbing.
They're trying to figure out how to contain it.
Sure.
Coming up with all these different ways, but it's a fascinating thing about human innovation.
If their backs are up against the wall, those crazy monkeys figure out a way to fix things.
Necessity is the main mother and we need to, sometimes we don't think we have the necessity Yeah, nuclear waste is a big problem, but you know, fossil fuel waste is a huge problem as well, and neither of them are perfect.
Even solar energy has waste, you know, because you have to build all the solar panels and you have to collect all the rare earth metals.
None of it's for free.
We have to find as best a trade-off as we can and still be able to try and sustain as good a standard of living for as many people around the planet as possible.
There's so many variables, obviously, but I'm always very excited when I see something like this that is like, my faith in the crazy humans has been restored.
These nuts have figured out a way to fix an issue or at least reduce an issue significantly by as much as 90-plus percent.
The fossil fuel thing to me is a weird one because obviously I enjoy it.
We use it.
It's so important for almost everything we do.
But obviously this is going to create a problem someday.
And there's no better example for me than automobile pollution or pollution that you get from jet airplanes on a daily basis.
There's a big impact in the environment every time the space shuttle gets launched, isn't it?
Yeah, well, you wouldn't want, you know, thousands of those launching every day, you know, but that wasn't a possibility and wasn't what it was going to do.
But compared to just...
How we burn coal to generate electricity and how we use cars to transport ourselves around.
There are 42,000 people a year killed just in car crashes.
That is a societal norm in the United States.
We expect that.
We say that's okay.
It's all right to kill 42,000 people so we have the freedom to drive our cars around wherever we want.
Kind of an interesting...
Level of accepted disaster.
You know, we just say that's okay.
And that's not some global warming problem that may manifest itself on our children.
That's a guaranteed thing this year.
And that's just an interesting thing to hold up the mirror and look at yourself and say, hmm, okay, that's what we decide is all right.
You mentioned earlier that with Galileo inventing the telescope, he was, you know, tortured for pointing out that we weren't the center of the universe.
And with every invention that's come since then, we've been able to prove more and more conclusively just how far from the center of the universe we are and also how huge the universe is and billions of years old and more vast.
The numbers are so big, they're incomprehensible, both in numbers of stars and number of galaxies.
And within the last few years, using the great-great-grandchildren of Of Galileo's telescope, we are seeing planets, directly seeing planets around the nearby stars.
And we've seen thousands of them.
So we've basically shown that every single star has planets.
And so there's an unlimited number of planets out there.
And so to think that with an unlimited number of chances that we are the only life in the universe, to me, is just a natural extension of thinking that We're the center of the universe.
It's an arrogance-egotism thing based on belief instead of fact.
But it's also, I think, arrogant and egotistical to think that we're so fascinating and we're so revelationary and so special that somehow...
Weird, big, black-eyed monsters with no hair on their bodies are sneaking around staring at us because we are so special.
To me, that's just...
I mean, it's fun science fiction, and it makes for great entertainment, but it's not real.
Well, I've heard that the archetype of the doctor, the alien with the large black eyes and the strange big head, that what it may very well come from is the actual birth experience for children.
The first time the eyes are outside of the womb, they don't have clear vision, and they see the bright light of the operating room, which is the first time they've ever been exposed to something like that, and it's an incredibly traumatic experience.
They recognize the eyes, which are enormous in front of the head, This face with a white mask on it, featureless.
And that this is most likely what the archetype of the experience, these medical experiments that supposedly go on with these aliens, that that's the origin of it.
Could be.
Well, we have this very arrogant idea that children don't remember things.
Yeah.
It's been my point about circumcision.
I don't think circumcision is a good idea.
I think it's ridiculous.
I think it's antiquated.
It's genital torture.
And I think the justification is, one of them is that the baby doesn't remember it.
And I'm always like, how do you know the baby doesn't remember it?
Just because they don't have a point of reference or context, it's very possible they remember it.
Well, the scientific answer to the alien abduction experience and these cold, hard medical examinations, emotionless medical examinations, may very well just be the birthing process.
And then the incredible feeling of helplessness that they have is basically their body doesn't move yet and that these intense memories are burned deep, deep, deep into our consciousness.
I think it also just comes from a fear of being alone and a fear of being immortal.
And if we can somehow convince ourselves that neither of those two things are true, then it's a great comfort to folks.
And to think that there's other life out there and it's holding us as super special and it's been here before and it's going to be back, it's a nice seductive thought process to go down.
But there is...
I mean, we have left Earth.
13 years ago this month, we permanently started living on the space station with the International Space Station program.
And the Soviets had been there for decades before on their space stations.
We have sent probes to every planet in the solar system.
We've got one going up to Pluto right now, and we're rovers on a couple different, three different planets and moons of the solar system.
If aliens did show up, I don't think their behavior would be the one that is in the common science fiction media.
You know, it just doesn't make sense.
So I am convinced there's life in the universe.
You know, just on the statistics of it, it just makes sense.
It's just egotism to think that we're that special.
But I think it's also just egotism to think that we're so special that we're the object of great secretive fascination by higher beings.
Well, I think you're very humble, and so you look at us and say that it wouldn't be that interesting.
But I say to you, imagine if we found out that there was a planet just outside of our solar system where there were some people that were there, they were just like human beings, but they were like human beings from like the 1300s.
They just hadn't figured anything out yet.
We would be like, holy shit, they have guns, they figured out the wheel, their light and their city's on fire.
They're crazy.
They just haven't figured out mass communication yet, and most of them can't read.
I think we would be absolutely- That sounds a lot like us right now, actually.
It is a lot like us right now.
We really haven't changed that much.
But I mean, if we found some people just from a thousand years ago, a thousand years in our past, we would be absolutely, incredibly fascinated.
I think if we found some being somewhere that had harnessed the power of fire, if we went back 40,000 years ago, I think we'd find it incredibly fascinating.
So the stuff that we can do, I don't buy it.
I think if I was an alien, I would be so fascinated by these freaks, these pink monkeys with bang sticks and the internet and religions and all the freak show stuff that we have down here on Earth.
I think we would be the most wonderful freak show of all time.
I've often said that if there is intelligent life in the Earth or outside of Earth, I think that Earth is probably the Tijuana of outer space.
Which explains why all visitations come in the middle of the night.
They're hammered and they want to see a show.
They want to go see the freak show.
I think if I was an intelligent being, I do not buy the idea what would be so special about human beings.
Where do we start?
There's a lot special about this crazy species above all other species on this planet.
There's seven billion of them, okay?
They're like rats on a sinking ship.
They inhabit every little spot in the ocean.
Find a little floating thing poking out of the ocean where some plants are growing on it, boom, there's a whole sea of people living there.
You know, go to Hawaii, this little tiny spot.
It's a million people in Oahu.
We're crazy.
I think I would look.
I think I would...
We gotta go there.
We gotta go to Earth.
I think we would be probably one of the most fascinating things to observe because we're so incredibly advanced and yet so contradictive, so hypocritical, so ridiculous, so easily led, so easily tricked and fooled.
We have access to instant information, but yet we choose to believe some of the most ridiculous things of all time.
I agree with you, though, that I find the evidence of us being contacted by aliens incredibly uncompelling.
And the people that I talked to, I did a sci-fi show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, where I met with a lot of these UFO guys, and I felt like I was talking to religious fanatics.
It's just like talking to a religious fanatic.
It's just they feel like they're too clever for the Quran.
You know, I think the real key to it is what does everybody want to get out of it?
What do you want to get out of your life?
And what do you find is your own compulsion?
What is it that gives you the satisfaction at the end of the day?
And it may be...
That stuff you've read on the internet, or maybe the television show that you watch, or maybe the sports team that you idolize, or it may be some new invention somewhere, or some area, your huge belief into some particular subset of what we know or what we don't know.
And to me, that's all great.
Everybody should be doing that, as long as they're pushing themselves to something that they're interested in, they're trying to get the best out of the things that they're naturally inclined towards and make the most of it.
It's just been what I've been doing.
I'm just interested in this particular part of spaceflight.
And case or us, fine by me.
Live and let live.
But don't spend all of those efforts in taking your particular set of interests and your beliefs that have given you this area and try and force them on other people.
Make them good for you.
Offer them up for other people to believe if they like.
But don't try and convince everybody else in the world that they're UFOs just because this is what you believe.